Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. I’d known it was there, behind King’s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, at university, and I knew Saint Pancras Churchyard was where Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also Mary, had taken the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when they were falling in love. When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility. I first visited at thirty-four, newly separated, on a cold gray day with a lover, daffodils rising around the squat cubic pillar. “MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,” the stone reads. “Author of A Vindication of the rights of Woman. Born 27th April, 1759. Died 10th September, 1797.” I didn’t tell him why I wanted to go there; I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand, and I often felt so lost that I didn’t want to talk to real people, people I wanted to love me rather than pity me, people I didn’t want to scare. I was often scared. I was frequently surprised by my emotions, by the things I suddenly needed to do or say that surged up out of nowhere.
Gaynor is part of a sea change in book publishing that has seen women surge ahead of men in almost every part of the industry in recent years. Once upon a time, women authored less than 10 percent of the new books published in the US each year. They now publish more than 50 percent of them. Not only that, the average female author sells more books than the average male author. In all this, the book market is an outlier when compared to many other creative realms, which continue to be overwhelmingly dominated by men.
These findings and others come from a new study by Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. Waldfogel crunches the numbers on the book market's female revolution. And, in a recent interview, the economist helps us think through potential reasons why women trail men in many creative industries, but have had spectacular success in achieving — in fact, surpassing — parity with men in the US publishing business.
I’ve always felt like a plant-person, moss and lichen covered; the land a part of me and me of it. The Irish landscape I grew up in is riddled with stone walls and stories, seventy thousand placenames and countless fairy trees. Irish placenames are derived from hidden histories or trees that used to grow there, ghost forests. Dair means “Oak” and is found in many placenames around Ireland. Townlands contain Cill, Irish for “cell” or “church,” demonstrating how intimately entwined our very cells-selves are with the Catholic church! In the first experiment in colonization, our language was beaten out of us. We had to learn in secret “hedge schools.”
The cover of the cookbook shows a bamboo basket laden with bell peppers, asparagus, and broccoli. Surrounding it on the table are scallions, ginger, dried mushrooms, peapods, a red onion. A fish, an eggroll, some dumplings, a pair of chopsticks. In the background, a white ceramic soup tureen waits coquettishly to be opened. A long, seductive purple eggplant and buxom bunch of bok choy lean against a garden window, or maybe it’s a wall with flowery wallpaper. It’s such abundant imagery, you would never notice what’s missing: shellfish, for example, and pork.
None of the items on the book jacket are conspicuously kosher, nor does the design suggest so-called Asian fusion. Today, an equivalent cookbook might be titled Jew-ish Chinese and include dishes like Mission Chinese’s famous kung pao pastrami. The book is Millie Chan’s Kosher Chinese Cookbook, or Millie Chan, as it’s known in my family. It predates this trend, but encapsulates an older American culinary tradition: the Jewish embrace of Chinese food.
During the service, my parents’ priest spoke of the daily pain Dad had lived with and how, in the end, he’d allowed this suffering to bring him closer to God. Of course, he couldn’t know the day or the hour. But he knew he would soon meet our Lord, and he prepared for that meeting. This, he concluded, is why my father ultimately knew peace at his death: It did not find him unready.
If that was true, I thought, why hadn’t my mother and I known? Had my father truly spent the past weeks, maybe even months, preparing to die? If he’d known his death was imminent, why didn’t he warn us? I stared at him in his casket, and the sudden flare of anger I felt was so unlike sorrow that I let myself take momentary refuge in it. If you really knew and didn’t tell us, that was a real dick move, Dad.
The novel is a meditation on vanity, the ways in which the pursuit of physical beauty can betray the other sources of beauty in one’s life, and how horror can lurk beneath the surface of even the most poreless skin. Huang asks: What — or who — are we willing to sacrifice in order to become beautiful, and what happens if it all gets stripped away? As the proverb goes: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting.” But where does it go?
This land is your land,
this land is Comanche land,
Mescalero Apache land,
Coahuiltecan land, my ancestors—
Flowers. Just a shit ton of flowers. Preferably exotic-looking ones like orchids, not pedestrian flowers like daisies—that would be confusing.